A Desperate Reach Of Love

There is a flickering in the wilderness.
Certainly we saw something, you and I, in the depth of all this darkness.
Over there, just to the left.
A light.
Somehow.
Pushing back against the darkness that tells us every day in screaming headlines that there is no God and that we are not—and could never, ever be—loved.
Something that seems to have fallen from the stars.
Come from the sky.
Tumbled down from a heaven which the darkness denies.
The darkness trying with all of its might to persuade us to believe that the voice we have followed, the voice we heard crying in the wilderness, is a figment of our imagination.
But the voice won’t be stilled or silenced.
And the voice is not mine.
The voice is not yours.
We both hear the voice testifying at this moment to the light.
And now, look. Certainly, the flickering grows brighter, as if our persistent steps have somehow fueled the light’s desperate reach of transcendent incandescence.
A desperate reach toward …
Can it be true?
A desperate reach of transcendent incandescence toward us?
Toward us all?
My, God! It is true!
But there’s more.
There is something inside the light.
As if the light has wrapped the greatest gift of all inside its bright shining:
A love brighter than the sun we cannot see.
A love that the darkness cannot hide forever.
Or even for another second.
An advent.
A coming that the darkness is powerless to stop.
A coming that has found us.
Finally.
Found us holding candles in a darkness that has become, for us, nothing more than a place for the light of this love to shine with greatest effect.
And now—just like that—the wilderness of sand has given way to the straw of a manger.
To a mother and her newborn.
To a father carefully tending the small fire that keeps us all warm as we gather with those who were there in the darkness with us, called by the light to unwrap this love.
A love that breathes.
A love that cries out into our own wilderness until our wilderness is healed.
A love that has a name:
Jesus.
A love that tells us that this love has other names, too.
Our own.
If.
If we let the light of this love reach out its incandescence through us toward those whom the darkness still binds with its lies.
If we go out into the wilderness of others and scatter their darkness with this truth:
There is a God.
We are loved.
And that love is forever.